Sunday, July 05, 2009

Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts110 West BroadwayEugene, OR 97401541-344-3482

Leah Wilson’s solo exhibition of recent work titled, Tropes will be seen at DIVA’s main gallery in Eugene, OR. The exhibition opens June 30 and runs through August 29, 2009 with a reception for the artist Friday, July 3rd from 5:30pm to 9pm during Eugene’s First Friday Art Walk.

Today every major river in Oregon violates water quality standards. Most of the pollution in Oregon’s rivers comes from urban and agricultural runoff. It is easily overlooked as it is not readily visible and the rivers maintain the illusion of health.

In this premier Oregon exhibition of Wilson’s work, she has created groups of paintings based on debris she has found in the rivers of Oregon and California. The waters claim the debris as their own, slowly changing it over time as if to appear part of the rivers themselves. Wilson views debris as a bridge between the natural wild areas of rivers and ourselves, markers that we have been here, leaving bits and pieces of our passing behind. She looks for the things that usually go unnoticed, the small things and the slowly changing things. She is drawn to the distortions created by the river on the debris and of our own perceptions of ourselves and the rivers.

Wilson received her M.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. Her penchant for traveling the world via whitewater kayak has brought her to many countries including New Zealand, Panama and Costa Rica. Guiding and teaching whitewater kayaking has allowed her to spend prolonged periods of time in a boat studying the subtleties of rivers. Wilson’s paintings have been exhibited at Julie Baker Fine Art in Nevada City, CA and featured at the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California, Los Medanos College Art Gallery in Pittsburg, California and the Oakland Art Gallery in Oakland, California. Her work is in the collections of eBay, Inc., Adobe Systems, Inc., Namco Inc., as well as other corporate and private collections, and her photography has been featured in Common Ground magazine. She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon.

About Me

We have been asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mocking bird on the chimney is singing… The real and proper question is: Why is it so beautiful? Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that ‘oui’ will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.” - Annie Dillard.
I read that in the laundromat as I waited for my clothes to finish the spin cycle and it has sat pounding around in my head since, my Rosetta Stone. I thought I understood the river pretty well. But the more I see it from different angles, with different eyes, the more I realize I am only understanding the river at the level of the infant who botches speech utterly. I have found that new continent right in my own backyard and am now spending my days trying to learn the strange syllables of the river one by one.
Please visit my website http://leahwilson.com